BEAST OF THE WOODS

Chapter 2

Inside the cave, he found the Beast of the woods. Behind the Beast of the woods, arranged around the walls of the cave, it had displayed the heads of its victims. The heads had been painstakingly painted and mounted on stands. They were all in various stages of rot.

Many bodies lay stacked neatly in the back of the cave. All of them had been defiled in some way. Some of them had been mutilated. The wavery green light came from a candle the Beast of the woods had placed behind the bodies, to display its handiwork. The smell of blood was so thick that Trog had to put a hand over his mouth.

As Trog took it all in, the methodical nature of it, the fact that the Beast of the woods had not eaten any of its victims, he found something inside of him tearing and then breaking.

"I...." he said, and looked into the terrible eyes of the Beast of the woods. "I...."

Almost sadly, with a kind of ritual grace, the Beast of the woods pried Trog's sword from his fist, placed the weapon on a ledge, and then came back to stare at Trog once more.

Trog stood there, frozen, as the Beast of the woods disemboweled him.

The next day, Trog was found at the edge of the Town, blood-soaked and s**t-spattered, legs gnawed away, but alive enough for a while to, in shuddering lurches, tell those who found him what he had seen, just not coherent enough to tell them where.

Later, Horley would wish that he hadn't told them anything.

There was nothing left but fear in Trog's eyes by the time Horley questioned him. Horley didn't remember any of Trog's answers, had to be retold them later. He was trying to reconcile himself to looking down to stare into Trog's eyes.

"I'm cold, Horley," Trog said. "I can't feel anything. Is winter coming?" "Should we bring his wife and son?" the farmer who had found Trog asked Horley at one point.

Horley just stared at him, aghast.

They buried Trog in the old graveyard, but the next week the Beast of the woods dug him up and stole his head. Apparently, the Beast of the woods had no use for heroes, except, possibly, as a pattern of heads.

Horley tried to keep the grave robbery and what Trog had said a secret, but it leaked out anyway. By the time most Town folks of Antler learned about it, the details had become more monstrous than anything in real life. Some said Trog had been kept for a week in the monster's lair, while it ate away at him. Others said Trog had had his spine ripped out of his body while he was still breathing. A few even said Trog had been buried alive by mistake and the Beast of the woods had heard him writhing in the dirt and come for him.

But one thing Horley knew that trumped every tall tale spreading through Antler: the Beast of the woods hadn't had to keep Trog alive. Theeber hadn't had to place Trog, still breathing, at the edge of the Town.

In the next week, four more people were killed, one on the outskirts of the Town. Several Town folks had risked leaving, and some of them had even

made it through. But fear kept most of them in Antler, locked into a kind of desperate fatalism or optimism that made their eyes hollow as they stared into some unknowable distance. Horley did his best to keep morale up, but even he experienced a sense of sinking.

"Is there more I can do?" he asked his wife in bed at night.

"Nothing," she said. "You are doing everything you can do."

"Should we just leave?"

"Where would we go? What would we do?"

Few who left ever returned with stories of success, it was true. War and plague and a thousand more dangers lay out there beyond the forest. They'd as likely become slaves or servants or simply die, one by one, out in the wider world.

Eventually, though, Horley sent a messenger to that wider world, to a fardistant sage to whom they paid fealty and a yearly amount of goods.

The messenger never came back. Nor did the sage send any men. Horley spent many nights awake, wondering if the messenger had gotten through and the sage just didn't care, or if The beast had killed the messenger.

"Maybe winter will bring good news," Christine said.

Over time, Antler sent four or five of its strongest and most clever men and women to fight the Beast of the woods. Horley objected to this waste, but the Town folks insisted that something must be done before winter, and those who went were unable to grasp the terrible velocity of the situation. For Horley, it seemed merely a form of taking one's own life, but his objections were overruled by the majority.

They never learned what happened to these people, but Horley saw them in his nightmares.

One, before the end, said to the Beast of the woods, "If you could see the children in the Town, you would stop."

Another said, before fear clotted her windpipe, "We will give you all the food you need."

A third, even as he watched his intestines slide out of his body, said, "Surely there is something we can do to appease you?"

In Horley's dreams, the Beast of the woods said nothing in reply. Its conversation was through its work, and The beast said what it wanted to say very eloquently in that regard.

By now, fall had descended on Antler. The wind had become unpredictable and the leaves of trees had begun to yellow. A far-off burning smell laced the air. The farmers had begun to prepare for winter, laying in hay and slaughtering and smoking hogs. Horley became more involved in these preparations than usual, driven by his vision of the coming winter. People noted the haste, the urgency, so unnatural in Horley, and to his dismay it sometimes made them panic rather than work harder.